In America, House Gets Snowed In. In Russia, Snowden Gets House!

When President Obama cancelled his meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin set for September’s G-20 meeting, he tried to explain it away as the culmination of a growing policy divide between the two nations. “We have reached the conclusion that there is not enough recent progress in our bilateral agenda with Russia to hold a U.S.-Russia Summit,” read the White House statement. “Given our lack of progress on issues such as missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, and human rights and civil society…we believe it would be more constructive to postpone the summit until we have more results from our shared agenda.”

About time! Over the past decade, Russia has trampled the agenda of not only the United States, but of the fundamental liberalism that undergirds Western society. Since inheriting Russia’s fledgling, oligarchic democracy from Boris Yeltsin in 2000, Putin has all but crushed it, allowing less and less berth to either side of him while accumulating a degree of power not seen since the Soviet Union. Under his regime Russia has grown friendly to horrendous violations of press freedoms, the persecution of political opponents, and most insidiously, a lull back to authoritarianism that the citizenry recalls with muscle memory. Most of this oppression is done openly. Obama saying that a gulf has opened between America and Russia is an understatement.

Except hang on, there’s more: “Russia’s disappointing decision to grant Edward Snowden temporary asylum was also a factor that we considered in assessing the current state of our bilateral relationship.” Come to think of it, the two leaders did meet on June 17 of this year, when all of the above about the pitiful state of Russian government was true, but before a 30-year old computer nerd exposed Obama’s own Putinesque violation of civil liberty.

Americans should be outraged that the freedom of a political refugee—our political refugee—trumps the multitude of grievances that we as leaders of the free world should address with Russia. For the crime of enabling, for the first time, the possibility of “the consent of the governed,” Snowden has leapfrogged assassinations, false imprisonments, sham elections, and the rest of the unholy routine as a primary policy concern of the United States vis-à-vis Russia. They may be speeding like a nuclear train toward autocracy, but it is their grant of freedom to one whistleblower working for the benefit of Americans, that has eroded the common ground between the two uncomfortable allies.

For Edward Snowden’s part, he should take satisfaction in the irony that he’s unwittingly brought the anti-liberty policies of both nations to the mainstream. His exposure of the American government’s shadowy surveillance apparatus has gone basically without a hitch. When he set out on this mission, though, he probably would have been delighted to know that his flight from American law would eventually prove to be the straw that broke the camel’s back between the United States and the oppressive Putin regime.

Washington’s anger over Snowden has catalyzed this overdue display of protest against this criminal Kremlin. Even if the present sanction is skipping one awkward meeting, denouncing Putin at all is an important statement. No less a public platform than The Tonight Show heard Obama acknowledge that “there have been times where they [in the Kremlin] slip back into Cold War thinking and a Cold War mentality.” Those times being, presumably, whenever a reporter writes a story exposing corruption, when any political opposition arises, when a businessman acquires too much money, or when free speech is exercised. ‘Slipping back’ indeed. All of the above represent the forcible reversal of Russia’s democratic impulse of the past 25 years, and it is deplorable.

Each of these forms of domestic oppression also have in common that they collectively fall, according to the Obama administration, under the category of “lack of progress on…human rights and civil society,” a factor less determinative to our relationship with Russia than arms, trade, and global militarism. On these counts it’s hard for the United States to point any fingers, but it is inarguable that by supporting repressive governments in Iran and Syria, Russia stands in direct opposition to American foreign policy. By refusing to cooperate with Obama’s non-proliferation agenda, they prize outdated warheads and rhetoric over a denuclearized landscape. And by criminalizing homosexuality, they are reopening an ugly history of pogroms and social cleansing that the civilized world thought we had done away with.

Russia’s accelerating combat with the interests and, especially, values of the United States is the context against which the issue of Edward Snowden’s non-extradition looks indescribably petty and hypocritical. Yet, it is apparently the single question that most divides the two countries.

In fact, the frosting-over of this diplomatic relationship is something of a redemption for Snowden. Until now he had just been a civic-minded black hat who decried the anti-liberty practices of a democracy by fleeing to a country that maintains a gulag system for political dissidents. Now, however, his asylum may have created enough of a rift between our government and Russia’s to allow for a fuller-throated Washington opposition to what they are doing. This is not to suggest cutting diplomatic relations; the opposite. One gets the sense that the United States has not concerned itself with Russia’s political agenda until it was stood up by their refusal to extradite Snowden. Obama’s White House used the same typically limp word to describe the universally-lambasted imprisonment of Pussy Riot as it did to describe Snowden’s sanctuary: “disappointed.” The difference, of course, was that the Snowden affair warranted a snub, whereas that desperate defense of free speech did not.

Last week, this site debated whether the United States should boycott the 2014 Sochi Olympics as a response to Russia’s anti-gay legislation. It seemed arbitrary: homophobia is far from that government’s only violation of the principles of democratic liberty. The assassination of journalists and the jailing of dissidents is every bit as worrisome as Russia posing a “Gay question.” If the developed world is to turn against Russia, as we should (personally I don’t think an Olympic boycott is the best way to do it) why limit ourselves to one issue of contention?

The same question stands for why President Obama chose the occasion of Edward Snowden’s asylum to make a stand against the Kremlin. They are a criminal junta who enjoy the West’s silence on their oppressive retrograde of Russia; so the West should respond back loudly. If only every country had an Edward Snowden to prod it in the conscience, maybe we would.